The future of the Encyclopedia Britannica may depend on what’s happening in two small rooms. One’s located within the gray tower at 310 S. Michigan that houses the company’s world headquarters. The other is 2,000 miles away in an unremarkable office building in La Jolla, California. The two rooms contain little more than tables piled with computer gear. But within the metal casings in both locations is a version of the encyclopedia that’s not only more accurate than the 1995 version of the print set, but already contains far more information—well over 1,000 more articles—than any future printed Britannica will ever hold. Every second, bits of this pool of information are being zapped out to users over the Internet.
Inside the headquarters repose reminders of Britannica’s other unique form of avoirdupois–its cultural weight. On the third floor, in the company library, five black metal bookshelves hold a set of every edition ever printed. The three volumes in the upper left-hand corner of the top shelf, are replicas of the first edition, produced in Edinburgh between 1768 and 1771. An authentic first edition is in a glass case up on the ninth floor, but it’s too rare and valuable to be used as a casual research tool. Terry Passaro, who’s been EB’s head librarian since 1972, says that throughout her tenure, the company has had a standing request at Sotheby’s and Blackwell’s, the Oxford bookstore, to be informed about any first editions that surface anywhere in the world. “And I have never been called. Wherever they are, they’re set. They just don’t move.”
This has occurred ever since, with two notable exceptions. Instead of releasing yet another printing of the 14th edition in 1974, Britannica, with enormous fanfare, announced the creation of a 15th edition. More than 4000 contributors from all over the globe rewrote the entire content. Mortimer Adler, who led the huge editorial undertaking, also devised a radical new structure for the self-proclaimed summary of all human learning. Rather than 24 volumes covering topics from A to Z, the 15th Edition would consist of ten volumes of shorter “ready reference” articles (the Micropaedia), 19 volumes of “knowledge in depth” (the Macropaedia), and a one-volume “Outline of Knowledge” (the Propaedia).
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To get a better sense of just how many curves events throw at the hapless encyclopedia publisher, it’s helpful to consult the American Library Association’s “Reference Books Bulletin.” The Chicago-based association which has regularly reviewed American encyclopedias since 1930, considers many elements, but one of the most important is what it terms currency. Examining the 1994 Collier’s Encyclopedia, the ALA judged that the publisher had “done a good job of keeping up with recent changes. For example, there is mention of the floods in Illinois during the summer of 1993; ousted Haitian president Aristide’s address to the United Nations in October 1993; the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court; the signing of the peace agreement between Israel and the PLO in September 1993; the election of Jean Chretien as Canadian prime minister in November” However, the bulletin notes with disapproval, the Collier’s “article on the telephone makes no mention of cellular phones; the latest advance discussed is the introduction of direct distance calling. . . . There is no reference to air bags in the list of safety features in “Automobile.’ . . . “Civil Defense’ still illustrates how to build and stock a basic fallout shelter.”
The encyclopedist’s task is further complicated by the nature of printed material. Indiscriminate changes and additions to the content of a document can require that almost every page be redesigned and reprinted, as type is shifted from one sheet to succeeding ones. Instead of incurring that enormous expense every year publishers choose to change only some sections. The new material can then be “interleaved” with the unchanged portions. How do they choose which pages to revise? “That’s one of the editors’ challenges,” Anne Long, Britannica executive director for electronic products explains. “If we’ve got 4,000 or 5,000 pages budgeted to be revised in a given year [out of about 32,000], which ones are going to get the works?”
But the Forbes article also gave the erroneous impression that Britannica had turned its back on the electronic realm. What really happened was a lot more complicated, as Harold Kester tells the story.
The disk was immediately popular, yet Britannica didn’t rush to put out a CD-ROM version of its main encyclopedia. Kester contends that the company did take one of the first steps toward that end within a few months of the Compton’s debut, when his team was commissioned to develop an electronic index to the main set. “You could ask it a question and it would tell you where [to look for an answer] in the print set,” he explains. Kester, whose company would be sold to Britannica in 1990, believes the encyclopedia publisher did recognize “that electronic publishing was in its future. Nobody knew in the late 1980s how to sell it or what the business model would be. But they were absolutely making the commitment to understand this medium.”
